I'm trying to implement something with the MahApps.Metro style. In the demo there are always those transitions if I click on another tab, but I think this is a little but too much. I found transitions in the documentation, but how do I manage the transitions of those tabs? Is that possible in some way?
I have been looking through the code of the demo, but I couldn't figure out how to control the transitions of the tabs itself. So everytime the content changes there is this transiton. Either I put in a custom transition or turn it off. How do I achieve this?
In MahApps.Metro, there are a few different types of TabControls. The one you're looking for is the one called MetroTabControl, not MetroAnimatedTabControl.
MetroTabControl is your regular TabControl with the Metro style, minus the transitions.
Related
I have a NavBarControl which contains collection of NavBarGroups.
NavBarGroup have a header and container control. NavBarGroups can be collapsed/expanded.
The button to expand/collapse is on right side. By default it looks like double up/down arrow. I want to customize this button to change its look and feel to indicate collapsed/expanded state.
(using Devexpress in Windows Forms)
For future reference, the self-help and online support at DevExpress is exceptionally thorough, and they will answer questions like this for paid subscribers within 24 hours, usually with a code sample.
In this case there are two ways to achieve your goal (assuming you're on a relatively recent version of DevExpress) as described here.
The "right way" to do what you want is to make a custom skin with your own icons; you can use their skin editor to open your current skin, make changes, and save it. Nearly every aspect of the look & feel of their controls is skinned and you can make pretty significant changes to them.
Deploying custom skins isn't all that complex but it might be a bit overkill for the effect you're trying to achieve. The other option is to custom draw the group caption. There's a sample attached to that post that is a working example of doing so, but you basically implement the CustomDrawGroupCaption event and do your own painting, including whatever icons you want based on the group's state.
I have a TabControl containing Prism regions. I want to trigger some kind of notification (e.g. flashing the tab header) for certain events, and I want to trigger this notification from the components in the Prism regions.
Once the tab containing such a component was open once, this works nicely using VisualTreeUtil.GetParent() and going up until I find my TabControl and can modify it to indicate the notification.
But the problem is that this doesn't work until the tab is opened by the user because VisualTreeUtil.GetParent() returns null; obviously because Prism doesn't hook up the visual tree until then.
Calling UpdateLayout() on the TabItem containing the region doesn't help. I don't want to open the TabItems programmatically, because this would confuse the user.
Is there anything I can do short of implementing a kind of region registry (which would be rather ugly and harder to maintain)?
If you want to look at code, I wrote a minimal solution to demonstrate the issue. The Print Structure button tries to go up the visual tree from the (initially unrendered invisible) hello TextBlock on the second tab. Before you switch to the tab it prints only the TextBlock, afterwards you get to the root of the visual tree. This is what I want to accomplish without switching to the tab.
Adding comment as answer:
This probably isn't exactly the answer you are looking for, but it seems like you're taking a very procedural approach.
Have you considered using an MVVM approach? Each TabItem in the TabControl can have a HeaderTemplate. In the template you can bind to a property in the ViewModel that causes the tab to flash or change appearance
Hm.. IIRC Prism regions are just a configured ContentControl/ContentPresenter. Once they are ready to work, all the bindings and datamodels should be in place, but the trees are left not created because they are invisible. If so, you should be able to call ApplyTemplate() on them to force it. I do not remember, however, if the Prism assigns the contenttemplates/datacontexts upon init, or upon demand - the latter may cause calling ApplyTemplate useless.
How can I animate the window elements in my application when showing them and closing them or switching between windows?
Using Control templates set Triggers on properties you wish to provide animations for to fire off a storyboard. You might check out this article or one like it. Or you can fire off a storyboard when a window becomes Active which there's also articles out there for like this one but a quick search for something like "WPF Animation" should provide a lot of places to start depending on your circumstances.
I think it's possible to animate a Window. However it's possible you do not enjoy the acceleration and ease that comes with other elements as, as far as I know, those elements are inside WPF while Windows are part of the OS. It's possible you end messing with OS's APIs.
I have an idea for a personal project. And I know one way of accomplishing it in Windows Forms (which I no longer wish to use). Basically I could (in WinForms) just draw everything onto the screen (Form) and then when I need to switch views/states of the application, just redraw the new stuff in the old stuff's place.
But how can we have different states in WPF? Is there a "right" or "proper" way of doing this? Is something like this covered somewhere in the docs?
I'd like to do my own searching, but I have no idea what exactly to look for, and current attempts at finding the right information, so far have yielded no helpful (or even relevant) results.
Any help at all will be greatly appreciated. I am new to WPF, but have been making a lot of progress this past week!
Thank you!
P.S.:
I just thouhght of something. If the solution was to draw what is needed for one screen, and when it is time to display the next screen, just dispose of/hide everything and create/display the new stuff, then how would we get around this? Because we can't/shouldn't change XAML markup at runtime, can/should we? :/
Not sure how you drawn your views/states in WinForms (direct painting on a Graphics object?).
The closest to what you're describing is the VisualStateManager. You can use it to statically define several visual states inside a single XAML and transit between them (using a smooth animation if you want).
If what you've done was show different Forms with Show/ShowDialog(), then the equivalent would be to use different Windows and Show/Hide them.
If you just cleared/added Controls to your form, then you can do just the same in WPF. Most Controls in WPF have a Content or Children property instead of Control.Controls in Forms.
I don't know if I understand what you really want. But here are my thoughts:
You can use several Windows and Show/Hide them accordingly
You can use the Frame/Page functionality in WP (MSDN)
if you really need to you could load your XAML and remove the topmost content in your Window and replace it with the loaded content
You could use the VisualStateGroup functionality to change the appearance of your current window
I think you will be happy with the second solution
How would you get a button to look and perform similar to that of the buttons in the volume mixer on Win7?
What I mean is that in the volume mixer there are icons that doesn't look like buttons until you hover them, they also haven't got the standard blueish color when hovered.
So far I haven't found a way to do this directly in visual studio.
I'm guessing that creating a custom user control is the only way to go, but I've had no luck so far, I would appreciate some examples.
In addition, there are also combo boxes in the volume mixer I would like to duplicate. They're hidden except for the text and arrow until they're hovered.
Is there a way to accomplish this?
(Here an image that might help explain what I mean:
http://i53.tinypic.com/2ij409u.png)
For windows application, (and also how they did win7), they used the technology called WPF. I am not specifically answering how you can do this, because in WPF, this is the fundamental that defining skin (via markup called XAML) without touching the implementation code. If you are serious in learning how to do that, I suggest you look for tutorials or good book about WPF.
Here's one of the markup looks like for a button. To modify the button's look, what you need is to define it's XAML, and you don't have to inherit it in the code. The example looks scary long, but Visual Studio could help you.
You could use a third party control library, for example Krypton Toolkit, its free!
There is quite a terrific solution for this button quest. You can paste pictureBoxes on form and handle MouseUp, MouseLeft and MouseDown events. When each of them fires, you need to set specific image (one of tree, in fact) - normal picture, picture of "highlighted" icon and picture of pressed icon. But that's really a hard and useless work, so better don't.
If you need several of such "buttons" in a panel, I remember, I once managed to get the same behaviour by using toolStrip with buttons.